David McGuinty

[Decorum, October 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, yesterday in this House the Minister of Foreign Affairs insulted the office he holds and confirmed Canadians' reservations about his suitability as our face to the world. The minister's role as Canada's top diplomat requires him to exercise a little diplomacy.

The government pretends to champion Canada's role on the world stage, but it seems that decidedly undiplomatic behaviour is just fine, as long as it is coming from a senior minister.

How can Canadians trust the minister to bite his tongue when snide little smears cross his mind at the UN, at NATO, or at other vital international meetings?

[Infrastructure, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the minister has clearly crossed the line. As regional minister for Mike Harris, he fired the Ottawa Hospital board of directors and fired the school board trustees and then stacked the boards with well-known Conservatives who left massive deficits in both places.

A Liberal government ensured that O-Train federal funding be capped and the entire contract be delivered at a fixed price. The contract does not allow for cost overruns and it does not allow for political interference.

Can the minister now reveal what new liabilities he has exposed the federal government to by breaking Treasury Board rules?

[Infrastructure, October 6th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, after two and a half years of negotiations and due diligence on the O-Train project here in Ottawa, the President of the Treasury Board has improperly summonsed and met with Siemens Corporation to “ask questions”.

The federal government has no contract with Siemens. Eight federal departments have signed off on the deal. Yet the minister demands details of a contract which he is not privy to and further demands of Siemens how best to delay a $654 million project.

Will the minister please now explain this improper intrusion into municipal affairs?

[Judicial Appointments, October 2nd, 2006]

Let me get this straight, Mr. Speaker. Now he blames Mr. Klein for the appointments.

The Minister of Justice has appointed Bruce McDonald as a federal judge knowing full well that he was a top fundraiser for the Minister of Public Safety, a top fundraiser for the Minister of Health and a top fundraiser for the Prime Minister.

Given that one of his key jobs is to uphold the ethical principles for judges and that Mr. McDonald raised funds for the Conservative Party up until 2004, will the justice minister now admit that his promise to end judicial patronage is nothing but Conservative hypocrisy?

[Judicial Appointments, October 2nd, 2006]

Let me get this straight, Mr. Speaker.

[Judicial Appointments, October 2nd, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, two weeks ago, the Minister of Justice appointed Bruce McDonald, a well-known Conservative fundraiser and organizer, as a federal judge. Now we learn that for 12 straight years he personally donated over $11,000 to the Reform-Alliance-Conservative Party.

The Minister of Justice has stated that he would never support judicial appointments where “who you know gets you on the bench”.

By making one of his party's top bagmen a federal judge, will the minister now admit that he has badly broken his promise?

[Committees of the House, September 29th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary's speech was well read and well delivered.

I would like to ask the hon. member a question that speaks to a fundamental element of the Kelowna agreement. It concerns the 10 year old, highly successful aboriginal business procurement strategy that our government delivered, that has been audited three separate times and which engages somewhere in the neighbourhood of 28,000 to 30,000 Canadian aboriginal businesses.

I asked this question of the member's colleague, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, some time ago when a document was leaked to me as an opposition member showing that the department was in fact dismantling the aboriginal procurement strategy for Canadians without even consulting aboriginal peoples.

We then found out that First Canadian Health Management Corporation in Winnipeg, which administered $1 billion of health benefits to aboriginal peoples over the last several years, woke up one morning to find out that on the MERX's procurement system there was an open RFP bid for some other company. We have seen all sorts of changes on procurement.

At some point in the parliamentary secretary's speech I think I heard him describe himself as an entrepreneur. I am trying to find out from the parliamentary secretary if it is the ideology of the University of Calgary or the chief of staff, Ian Brodie, or is it the Prime Minister's view that the marketplace should not be fettered and that the minimum set asides that are under the Treasury Board guidelines, which are still on the website of Treasury Board, should not be respected in some way because they are fettering the marketplace? Could he explain how the kind of procurement strategy we have for aboriginal peoples, now 10 years old, audited three times, highly successful and continues to be dismantled, is a positive aspect of Canada's new government?

[Government Programs, September 27th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, the Conservative minority government's decision to abolish the court challenges program of Canada is worrisome for Franco-Ontarians, who still remember when Mike Harris's Conservative government tried to close Montfort Hospital along with 27 others.

Do the former members of the Harris government, known today as the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Health and the President of Treasury Board, not get it? Are they only interested in the minority they are clinging to in this House?

[Canada Transportation Act, September 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from the Bloc Québécois for her comments on Bill C-11.

I would like to ask her a specific question. The minority government has been saying for some months now—in fact, since it was elected—that it intends to present a new environmental plan for Canadians and to share this new approach. Apparently this is “Canada's New Government,” as we now see on the Internet.

The government has also cut funding for the Pacific Gateway in western Canada. The minority government is in the process of compromising our relations with China. It has come to a point where even the Ambassador of China refuses to attend official meetings with the government.

Could the hon. member help us understand the following? How can the government talk about new environmental strategies when there is no reference in the bill to greenhouse gases, no reference to an environmental strategy and no reference to the Kyoto protocol except in the preamble of the bill, which mentions the word “environment” just once?

Yesterday we heard the Minister of Transport tell Canadians that apparently Bill C-11 would have a rather positive impact on protecting the environment. I believe he was referring to the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Could the hon. member help us understand how it is possible for us, as parliamentarians, to reconcile what the government is saying with how the bill is currently worded?

[Canada Transportation Act, September 20th, 2006]

Mr. Speaker, as the official opposition critic for transport it is enlightening to hear an evolving NDP position on the bill.

I would like to go back to a theme the member raised and put a couple of questions to him. He did raise the question of transparency and accountability and then really took it quite hard to the government in terms of its accountability and appointments process. I have a hard time reconciling those comments with the activities over the past six months of his colleague, the member for Winnipeg Centre, who has been in large part the stalking horse and the apologist for this government on its Bill C-2, the federal accountability act.

I would like to remind the member about some of the wonderful appointments taken on by the previous government in the past, including the appointment, for example, of Stephen Lewis, for whom we fought tooth and nail to get appointed as Under-Secretary-General to the United Nations. There was the appointment of Ed Broadbent for seven years as the President and CEO of Rights and Democracy in Montreal and, of course, my very good friend Mike Harcourt, the former NDP premier of B.C. who was appointed on three separate occasions by the Liberal government to take on some very important public policy work.

My question for the member, now that he has raised a number of issues which I am looking to discern through to find out how we can improve the bill, is the environmental question. There is no greenhouse gas reference in this bill whatsoever. This is at a time when the government purportedly is in the process of devising some sort of new environmental plan or strategy. I guess it will go along with the theme of a new government, a new environmental policy. I am not sure where it is. It has been seven months, to correct the record. How does the member take the fact that under Bill C-11 there are no environmental measures, no greenhouse gas references and, clearly, no effort to deal with the environmental and climate change challenge?